Over the Wine Dark Sea

Once the ship lay alongside a pier, Sostratos mentioned the whirlpool to one of the longshoremen who was making a rope fast. The fellow dipped his head. 'You're lucky you came away with your lives,' he said. 'There's plenty of ships been sucked down to the bottom prow-first. They wash up, all broken to pieces, on the shore south of here.'   Some of the sailors looked worried again. Sostratos said, 'Sounds to me like a story to frighten strangers.' The longshoreman gave him a sour stare. He concluded he was right.   As happened at any port around the Inner Sea, a small crowd of curious men gathered on the wharf by the Aphrodite. Menedemos began extolling the goods the akatos had brought to Messene. He also threw in tidbits of news from out of the east. In turn, the Messenians told him what they knew of the war raging farther south on the Sicilian coast. Unfortunately, they knew no more than the folk of Rhegion had.   Sostratos asked, 'What will you do here if the Carthaginians do take Syracuse?'   That produced an unhappy silence in the crowd. At last, a skinny, gray-haired man said, 'Hope they'll let us pay tribute and not put in a garrison.'   'Not me!' a younger man said. 'If it looks like the Carthaginians are going to take over all of Sicily, I'm getting out of here. I'm not taking any chances with those whoresons, not me. You know what happens when they sack a city?' He gave a melodramatic shudder.   Without a doubt, the Carthaginians did dreadful things when they took a city. So did Hellenes. Sostratos thought of what Alexander had done to Tyre not long after he was born. That story had been circulating for a generation now, and hadn't shrunk in the telling. Sostratos did a little discreet shuddering himself. Like every other Rhodian, he hoped none of Alexander's surviving generals would cast a covetous eye toward his polis.   As Hellenes had a way of doing, the Messenians standing on the pier divided into factions and started arguing with one another. Before long, they were paying hardly any attention to the Aphrodite: their own quarrel seemed more entertaining. Sostratos nudged Menedemos. 'Why don't you run out the gangplank? I'll go into the agora and see if I can drum up some business.'   'Good idea,' his cousin said.   By the time Sostratos got up onto the pier, the locals were shouting insults at one another. A couple of them had hands on knife hilts, though nobody'd yet drawn a weapon. But with the shouts of 'Traitor!' and 'Liar!' flying back and forth, how long before someone did? Sostratos carefully picked his way around the edge of the crowd and headed up the pier toward dry land.   He hadn't been on that dry land more than a few heartbeats before he realized he'd have trouble finding the agora. Hippodamos and his ideas had never come to Messene. Streets and alleys and lanes didn't run in straight lines or intersect at right angles. They did exactly as they pleased, curving and twisting and doubling back on themselves. Had Sostratos gone out of sight of the harbor, he would have been lost in moments.   He was glad he figured that out before it happened. 'How do I get to the agora?' he asked a man in a grimy chiton leading a donkey festooned with very plain clay pots.   The man didn't say anything. He just stopped in the middle of the street -  incidentally blocking Sostratos' path -  and waited. Sostratos wiggled his tongue to dislodge one of the oboloi he'd stashed between the inside of his cheek and his lower teeth. 'Thanks, pal,' the fellow with the donkey said as Sostratos handed